“Usability of Open Source Software, WordPress for Creating Websites”,

Abstract

The thesis entitled Usability of Open Source Software in creating Website is to know the usability of WordPress for creating websites. The specific objective of this thesis is to identify the common understanding and attitude of WordPress,to identify use and adoption of OSS WordPress, and to know the technical configuration to be used in creating website. The purpose of this thesis is to study, investigate open source cms ‘WordPress’. The research is divided into two complementary parts: theoretical part and analytical part. The theoretical part mainly describes open source software, content management systems, WordPress, usability and the evaluation methods. The analytical part is to compare and analyze the results found from the empirical research. Heuristic evaluation method was used to measure usability problems in the interfaces. The study is fairly limited in scope; eight tasks were designed and implemented in each interface for discovering defects in the interfaces. Usability problems were rated. Time it took by each task, level of problem’s severity and type of heuristics violated were recorded, analyzed and compared. The results of this study indicate that the comparing systems provide usable interfaces. System usefulness, Information quality and overall usefulness of the system is measured and found WordPress as the most usable system for the professional staff lacking programming skill. The results of this study indicate that, there are some areas that contain barriers to learn Wordpress. Therefore, tools are needed to assist the learning process. Two potential tools are a user’s guide and the other is curriculum. A user’s guide or manual would be an effective way to encompass an extremely comprehensive set of instructions.